IFEC rolls out financial education campaign across online and offline channels

The Investor and Financial Education Council (IFEC) has launched a campaign with the aim to enhance the public’s awareness of debt management.

The three-month campaign, “Loans Are No Fairytale”, includes two videos and a TVC which features actors Michael Ning and Kate Ng. The TVC tells the story of the easy access to loans from money lenders, which may result in a prolonged repayment period. Before the end of the TVC, Ning and Ng ask audiences to reconsider the need for borrowing money by calling out the tag line: “Avoid over-borrowing. Think before you borrow. ”(過度借貸搞唔掂　計過度過先好簽)

The first video features a fairytale between a prince and a lady dancing happily before midnight. However, at midnight, the prince is required to pay a debt as he borrowed money to decorate the site to please her. The second story features a king who decides to borrow money to buy new clothes with lots of holes in them, playing on a pun, as the pronunciation of “holes” in Cantonese (窿) is the same as “loan” in English.

These videos and the TVC hope to promote the new borrowing and debt calculator developed by IFEC, which helps users understand the amount of repayments, period, and borrowing costs, highlighting the impact before they borrow money and helping them to  manage their loans and reduce existing debts.

The campaign is running until April. It will run across online platforms such as the official Facebook page of The Chin Family, IFEC’s financial education platform, and its Instagram account.

OOH promotions include ads on the exteriors of buses as well.

The campaign goes with a survey conducted by IFEC, showing that 20% of respondents spent more than they could afford, while 12% were in debt.

The problem is more serious among young working adults – 35% of respondents under the age of 30 spent more than they could afford before, while 32% were in debt.

Meanwhile, on a scale of one to 21, the financial literacy score of Hong Kong people went up from 14.4 in 2015 to 14.8 in 2019 as a result of improvement in the areas of financial knowledge (from 5.8 to 6.2) and attitude (2.7 to 2.9).

The build-up of financial knowledge is evident across all population segments, notably with the mature segments, such as mature working adults (aged 30 to 49), pre-retirees (aged 50 or above) and retirees, contributing to the higher financial attitude score.

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